Sarah Colt Productions

Sarah Colt is an independent documentary filmmaker who has been working in public television for sixteen years.  She is currently directing and producing Henry Ford and the American Dream for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. Most recently, she wrote, directed, and produced A Nation Reborn and A New Light for FRONTLINE and AMERICAN EXPERIENCE’s special series God in America. In 2009 two films of hers aired on PBS: The Polio Crusade, a one-hour program about the development of the polio vaccine for PBS’s AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and Geronimo, also aired in 2009 as part of PBS’s special series on Native American history, We Shall Remain.

She previously worked for David Grubin productions, where she produced the highly acclaimed biography RFK, and earned an Emmy award for Outstanding Science, Nature, and Technology for co-producing The Secret Life of the Brain, a five-part series. Some of her other producing credits include Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm, Making Schools Work with Hedrick Smith, and Young Doctor Freud.  In 2004 Colt was awarded an International Reporting Project Journalism Fellowship and traveled to Namibia to report on the racial imbalance of land ownership in Southern Africa.

Colt attended Harvard University where she began her documentary career as a still photographer and earned several prizes for her work, including a Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship that sent her to Zimbabwe for a year.

David Belton joins Sarah Colt Productions after 16 years with the BBC, where he began as one of 10 graduates selected from 2,500 applicants for the BBC’s Production Trainee Scheme. While working at Newsnight, the BBC’s award-winning nightly current affairs program, he made films in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe covering the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the genocide in Rwanda, the economic meltdown in Asia and civil unrest in the Middle East.  Belton joined the BBC’s Documentary Department in 1998 making films on the civil war in Zaire, the spread of multi drug resistant TB in Soviet prison camps and the disgraced Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson.

In 2004 David co-wrote the story for Shooting Dogs, the award-winning feature film about the Rwandan genocide starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy. He produced the feature and was nominated for a Bafta (Outstanding Contribution in a First Feature). The film was released internationally (in the United States as Beyond the Gates) and won Best Film and Audience Awards at film festivals in Europe, South America and the USA. Belton’s 2006 documentary Van Gogh – Power of Art won a Bafta and he subsequently directed several episodes of the 2008 BBC Drama series, Ten Days to War.

In 2008 Belton was Series Director of God in America and wrote, produced and directed the first two episodes (A New Adam and A New Eden).  He recently completed a two-hour special for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, The Amish, which airs on February 28, 2011. His first book, Beyond All That, will be published by Transworld in 2013.

Sabrina Zanella-Foresi has been making films since 1991, and has worked primarily as a feature-length documentary editor since 2001. Her editing credits include: Photographic Memory, directed by Ross McElwee (2011); Animas Perdidas (Lost Souls), directed by Monika Navarro (2009); The Truth About Cancer, directed by Linda Garmon (2008); For the Love of Movies, directed by Gerald Peary (2008); Shadow of the House: Photographer Abelardo Morell, directed by Allie Humenuk (2007); Twisted, directed by Laurel Chiten (PBS INDEPENDENT LENS, 2007); A Jew Among the Germans, directed by Marian Marzynski (PBS FRONTLINE, 2005); Damrell’s Fire (PBS, 2005), and Touched (2003).  She has acted as consulting editor on several documentaries, including Buddy and Anya: In and Out of Focus.

Zanella-Foresi also has six years of university teaching experience in Film/Video Production and Film Studies at Boston University, Harvard University, Emerson College, University of Massachusetts-Boston, and the Massachusetts College of Art.

Helen Ryan Dobrowski has worked with Sarah Colt for three years on PBS productions including episodes three and four of God in America and The Polio Crusade. Most recently, she worked with producer Laurie Block on Becoming Helen Keller, a two-hour program for PBS’s AMERICAN MASTERS. She previously worked at Boston College, her alma mater, in University Advancement Marketing and Communications. In 2005, Helen was awarded the Costa-Gavras Social Justice Award for her work with Film Studies chair and professor John Michalcyzk on a segment of his series on disabilities titled I’m In Here. She is currently co-producing Henry Ford and the American Dream.

Liz Shea recently completed work on The Amish, and is currently working on Henry Ford and the American Dream. She joined Sarah Colt Productions in 2009 to work on episodes three and four of the six-hour documentary series God in America for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE. Previously, she worked with Ben Loeterman Productions on a feature-length historical documentary titled The People v. Leo Frank, which aired on PBS in late 2009.

Afton Ojuri joined Sarah Colt Productions in the summer of 2011 as an intern to work on The Amish, her first documentary film. Currently, she is working as a production assistant on Henry Ford and the American Dream. She is also pursuing her Master’s degree in Gender and Culture Studies at Simmons College.

Helen Yung, an independent production accountant, brings to the team over 15 years of production experience.  She has worked on all aspects of budget creation, monitoring, tracking, final project cost reconciliation and analysis, and the application of MA Film Tax Credits for various made-for-television and cable programming produced for WGBH, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, A&E and various independent productions with funding from NEH, ITVS, LPB and PBS.